How interesting...here we are just about a week before MLK Day, and I just found it. Ive been looking for this quote since 1996, almost 20 years, and I just found it tonight. Its from one of Martin Luther Kings sermons. I used to have a beautiful poster with this quote framed on the wall of my office where I was the Director of Social Responsibility for a huge region in Louisiana. My office oversaw environmental justice, racial justice, the office for persons with disabilities, emergency assistance, homeless shelters, prison ministry, the list seemed endless...it was a huge job and I was so young, but I had the chance to do so much good and I learned so much about how people can oppress and hurt other people. Seemingly good people doing evil. I met people of great courage and vision. I cant remember where I got the poster--a gift maybe--but this quote has lingered in my mind all these years and been my conscience--even though I couldnt remember the exact words. But here are excerpts from that sermon: Though things go wrong, though evil is temporarily triumphant, though sickness comes and the cross looms, nevertheless, Im going to believe anyway and have faith anyway... Somewhere along the way, you should discover something that is so dear, so precious to you, so eternally worthwhile, that you will never give it up. You ought to discover some principle, you ought to have some great faith that grips you so much that you will never give it up... It means in the final analysis you do right not to avoid hell...ultimately you must do right because its right to do right. You must love ultimately because its lovely to love. You must be just because its right to be just. You must be honest because its right to be honest. And finally, you must do it because it has gripped you so much that you are willing to die for it if necessary. I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live. You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house. So you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice. --Martin Luther King, Jr., from his But if not sermon, given at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on November 5, 1967. The title, But if Not, comes from Daniel chapter 3, verse 18, in the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 04:14:52 +0000
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